


Doctor's Sorrows

by ryyves



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-20
Updated: 2015-11-20
Packaged: 2018-05-02 12:19:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5248040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryyves/pseuds/ryyves
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will Solace has doctor's hands. He has lost too many lives, and he expects to count Nico di Angelo as just another among his dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Doctor's Sorrows

Everything falls apart – families, hearts, the fractured-diamond eyes Will woke to in the infirmary, the eyes he reached first to cover with a shroud and only afterward with a blanket. No matter how talented Will Solace was with ambrosia and stitches and splints, he couldn’t piece the broken things back into a whole, not without scars and seams.

The boy who slept in Cabin 13 had black looking-glass eyes. For a long time, Will saw nothing in them but fractures.

Will had inherited both plague and healing from Apollo. He learnt his curses in wartime, when he’d seen the Ghost King raise an army of spectres and counted his dead, when he’d watched blisters form beneath his fingers on the bodies of the wounded, when he hid trembling behind trees in the forest of Olympus, sterile gloves on his hands, guarding the groaning ill. Later, when he danced through the celebration with the gods, he excused himself at the peak of the party to heave his horror up among the lilies.

He returned to Camp Half-Blood with less than half his cabin, as a veteran and a war leader. He offered his shoulders to the grief of his siblings, for he couldn’t fill the empty bunks with anything but ghosts. He didn’t look at his hands, and when he did, bile rose in his throat. He wore sterile gloves every minute in the clinic.

Will pushed himself to exhaustion – he couldn’t sleep for a minute or he risked waking to a corpse. He lost eight pounds in two months, and then ten. He tried to do good.

He caught sight of the retreating shadows of the boy from Cabin 13 at the edge of camp, and kept his eyes away, until the guilt grew unbearable. If Nico died because Will wouldn’t look at him, the son of Hades’ blood would be on Will’s hands. He would be a horrible doctor if he turned down the boy who most needed him.

It took Will months to see the refracted light in Nico’s eyes. It took him much longer to see that darkness didn’t mean death, and the shadows beneath his skin didn’t make him horrible. Will’s own eyes were so much chipped diamond, dull and catching light on jagged edges. He stared at his shaking hands for a long time.

He let Nico sleep, cracked eyes closed. Will removed his sterile gloves and covered Nico with a blanket where he lay on the hospital cot.

This boy wouldn’t need a shroud, not as long as Will had both shadows and sunlight in his hands, and saw Nico’s cracked-diamond eyes in his own.


End file.
